19 February 2013
The week before the Chinese New Year holiday, I happen to glance upon the bunch of
desktop PCs on my table (I occupy the space for 2 persons; the other table is where the
PCs are, for proximity and easier maintenance). I thought I saw some
error message thrown out in one of the PCs. However, I checked that activities are running fine, so I dismissed that simply as my eye playing a trick on me and nothing to worry about.
Now came the long holiday. At home, I can’t do a remote connection to that particular PC. Still, scheduled programs are still working fine, since 4 PCs are paired, with 2 doing the same thing, alternating on a regular interval. Such is the design, so that if all four are working, the time for execution is cut in two, and even if one of the pairs is down, the work is still done. Unless both PCs in a pair go down, then nothing will get done.
What’s more, there were fewer requests; of course, it was a holiday, so that the difference in time, the time lag, is nothing sort of easily recognizable.
Anyway, the remaining 3 PCs were able to pull through the holiday period, and all the while unmanned.
When I came back to work on the 14th, I found out that 2 PCs were actually giving problem, fortunately, the other one was the pair of the alternate. That means only 1 PC from each pair is properly working. Woo ho! And I was spared from coming back to the office by the faithful pair...
I took a seat and planted myself infront of the erring PC (for I didn’t know about the other one at the time). When the batch job runs, it throws out some error on
Oracle dll not initialized, or something like that. I was wondering, nothing has been done so far, and this PC has not been modified for some time, and it’s been running fine. Why now?
When I called up the code in
Visual Studio, presumably to run the program in Debug Mode, after setting up the break point and pressing F5, I got a different error, something to do with Visual Studio’s “coloader80.dll” or something, and that prevents me from running the code in Debug Mode. I press CTRL-F5, and I get the Oracle dll error. I press F5, and I get the coloader80.dll error. I’m stuck!
Normally, if we can’t solve a problem, we tend to take our eyes off it, and that is what I did. Thinking hard, I scratched my head, thought a bit more, and then looked around, at the other PCs. To my surprise, I noticed that another PC from the other pair was also giving an error, and it was a different one. This time, the error was something about DMQ dll. I began to wonder why there are several errors, and this is pointing to dll issues. I immediately refused the idea of having to reinstall Visual Studio, at least, and at the most,
Windows OS. But I really can’t think of any reason why the errors suddenly come, and errors are different on different computers!
With that initial data, I mused, could it be Windows?
I called up my ever-trusty friend Google, typed “fix windows”, and I saw the list returned by the search engine, made a decision, and then downloaded the freeware. It came from tweaking.com, and the link brought me to majorgeeks.com, so finally I downloaded the program. I then installed it, and called it up afterwards. Having downloaded, installed and run other programs from reliable authors and companies, I am confident about running this Windows Fix freeware. I am a regular user of download.com, even before it was owned by
CNET. So perusing the new program, I saw a few tabs, saw what’s offered, and I clicked the buttons.
Basically, it was fixing file association, running chkdsk, etc., etc., and finally, to fix the registry. Of course, there is a mandatory (or rather, a default) mode to back-up registry before the fix is done, and this all went on smoothly. When the PC finally rebooted, and chkdsk completed, I logged in, and when the
batch programs were run, the problem was gone!
Wonders!
Without hesitation, I did the same on the other PC. Having completed everything on Windows, reboot was done, chkdsk was executed and finished, and I logged in to Windows. Is the problem fixed? You betcha!
Having fixed the 2 problematic PCs, I thought to myself, “What if the other PCs that don’t show problem now actually have similar issues, and they are only waiting for the opportune time to ruin my holiday?”
I took that as a very strong reason to run the fix program, and when all 4 PCs were done, I saw that the
Internet Explorer setting was messed up a bit, restored to its freshly-installed state, where the proxy wasn’t defined. Not a major impact, since I didn’t need to go web surfing yet. The only other effect I saw was in Windows Update, the previously hidden updates were shown again. Not a big deal, since hiding them is quick and easy. Other than that, all the batch jobs were again running fine and all without errors: the Oracle dll error, the DMQ error, and the coloader80.dll error – they’re all gone now!
And after a couple of hours passing, and verifying that there is no ill-effect after the fix-program run, I declared that the program is safe, and it works!
When I got home, I run the fixer on the desktop and laptop PCs, and I could say that it is quite effective, in that my very old desktop got a bit faster. Hope it stays that way until I’m able to buy a new one for my kids.
Till then!
Reference:
Windows Repair (All-In-One)
Image via Wikipedia17-Nov-2011
I was testing a new network connection from my cable modem since it is supposedly free. And I'm not that very familiar with this task, I know a bit of it here and there. I happen to install a network driver, and what happened next is something that I did not want: the login screen was changed, and it was asking now for a password.
The third day, I think I got the answer.I tried typing for NetWare and XP login screen, but what it should be is "Welcome Screen and Fast User Switching" search text. That is what gave me the help I needed.
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